You Should Have Let It Go

I think it is fair to say that the Rambo series of films are a joke at this point. We’ve had five of them, of increasingly diminishing returns with the high point reached at the first sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and each film from there making less and less until the last two, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood, both failed at the Box Office (the last being a certified bomb). And you can kind of understand why: the hero, such as he is, became a 1980s kitsch pastiche, emblematic of what was wrong with 1980s action cinema. He was too big, too sweaty, too brawny, killing everything in sight without a second thought.

Hell, at this point you don’t even need to have seen a Rambo film to know exactly what he looks like, how he acts, what he does. His character is iconic, but arguably not in a good way. He’s a bygone character of a bygone era, used as parody, as the butt of jokes, as shorthand reference for a gag. You could see it even in the 1980s, with Rambo III coming out in 1988 and the next year’s UHF doing an elaborate parody of the character and the movie’s setting. Within eight years Rambo went from a serious drama with some action into a full-on parody of itself to give audiences the action they thought people wanted to see. As per the Box office returns, the studio was wrong.

But here’s the thing: that first film, which isn’t even called Rambo but, instead, First Blood, is a very different kind of film from the ones we received afterwards. Where the later films (which we will get to) are over-the-top 1980s cheese, the first film is a very grounded movie about a soldier struggling to find his place in a country, the USA, that doesn’t want anything to do with him now that he’s no longer useful to them as a soldier. Vietnam was still fresh on people’s minds, and in 1982 the issue of what to do to help soldiers was something many felt the government was ignoring. Stepping into that was First Blood, a film that tries to tackle that subject head on, and in the process managed to give us one of the best Sylvester Stallone characters in the process. It’s just a pity the films couldn’t just let him have his moment and then move on.

The film focuses on John Rambo (Stallone), a Vietnam vet and former Green Beret who has struggled since he got home from the war. His entire squad was killed, one by one, while overseas, with only himself and one other soldier surviving. Except that once he got home, and walked his way to his friends house across the country, he found that his buddy was dead, cancer caused by Agent Orange, and he was all alone. Distraught, he continues walking, heading into the mountain town of Hope where, once the local sheriff, Will Teasle (Brian Dennehy), sees him, the cop immediately works to usher him out of town. Quite rudely, in fact.

Incensed, Rambo walks back into town, and is immediately arrested by the sheriff for vagrancy and resisting arrest. The sheriff’s men are none too gentle with Rambo during processing, which sets off his PTSD and causes him to eventually lash out. Rambo escapes, running off, stealing a motorcycle and heading up into the mountains, with the sheriff in hot pursuit. But Rambo is very well trained, and he quickly disappears, requiring the sheriff to put together a full posse to catch the soldier. And when things turn south and most of the sheriff’s men end up seriously injured, or worse, the sheriff decides to call in the state police as well as the National Guard. All over one soldier that wasn’t even doing anything wrong except existing.

The thing that I find interesting about this film over all the Rambo movies to come is just how somber the film is. Despite it being an action film at certain times, the movie is much more invested in Rambo’s character and the drama of the situation he finds himself entrenched within. This film might have the trappings of an action adventure, but it has a much more serious story it wants to tell, one about loss and grief and a soldier without a path in life because the country he fought for has abandoned him.

To be honest, this is a far more compelling film than I had expected. I hadn’t seen First Blood before, only catching bits and pieces of the later films when I was growing up and they were playing on cable. Those movies are over-the-top and pretty silly, as you would expect from adrenaline-loaded, run-and-gun, action adventures of the decade. First Blood doesn’t feel like those films; coming out when it did in the early 1980s, when Stallone was more known for his work in the boxing dramas of the Rocky series (Rocky III coming out just a little while before First Blood in 1982) than as an action hero, this film has a very different vibe to it.

Honestly, this film felt very appropriate for the Stallone of 1982. The actor had starred primarily in dramas and comedies up until that point, but it was because of First Blood and, more to the point, its sequel, Rambo: First Blood Part II, that he launched his action career. Plenty of action films followed, with the likes of Cobra, Over the Top, Tango & Cash, and more all quickly following. It all but wiped away the dramatic work the actor had been known for, with films like Cop Land dying at the Box Office because people expected action, not drama, from the actor.

But let’s be clear: Stallone is good here. Really good, in fact, getting all aspects of the character and really inhabiting him. Yes, he’s a US trained killing machine that takes no prisoners and could wipe out an entire platoon if he had to. At the same time, though, he’s a broken man and a flawed character, and there aren’t a lot of actions that could have handled that role, especially in 1982. Stallone, who had some power and nuance in his performance as Rocky Balboa, was one of the few who could do it, and the character helped make him an A-list action star practically overnight.

Of course, that doesn’t downplay the message this film was trying to tell. Rambo doesn’t want to kill, and in fact does everything he can to avoid it. He just wanted to be left alone, but a bad cop and his cruel squad of deputies had other plans. This film touches upon a lot of topics, from PTSD to America turning a blind eye on its soldiers, and police brutality. It’s heady stuff, especially in a film where you wouldn’t expect to find it. But that’s the thing about the Rambo legacy: its eventual evolution into dumb 1980s action cheese has obscured the fact that the first film in the series, First Blood, was anything but. It was a very different film for a very different time, and audiences loved it.

I would actually argue that the love audiences felt for the film was a direct contributing factor to the series’ eventual evolution and downfall. This film is a somber and series tale, even with the trappings of the action genre it includes, and it never loses sight of the character (who he is and what he’s gone through). The later films see only that he’s really good at killing people, and they play up the carnage he can cause. If this film had been less successful, it might have spawned different sequels, or even no sequels at all, changing its legacy.

As it is, the character of Rambo is now something of a joke, but his first film is anything but. First Blood is a deeply involving, very interesting, and at times action-packed adventure of a man on the edge, and it works so well. Were this the only film to feature John Rambo, I think that would have been perfectly fine. It’s great on its own and it doesn’t need any kind of continuation to tell exactly the story it needed to tell. Anything more takes away from its power.